


Tessellate

by cloudy_blue



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Alternative Perspective, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, Developing Relationship, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:22:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27731473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudy_blue/pseuds/cloudy_blue
Summary: No one had prepared her for John.Maybe they could have put aside fifteen minutes in-between teaching her how to make her stitches even and her chicken cooked through – what to do if your man is also sleeping with his bassist.(1962; 1964; 1968. Cynthia reflects on her husband's relationship with Paul.)
Relationships: Cynthia Lennon/John Lennon, John Lennon/Paul McCartney
Comments: 14
Kudos: 92





	Tessellate

**Author's Note:**

> This is very fictional. I hope you like it.

**i_**

**Liverpool, 1962**

No one had prepared her for John.

In Home Ec she had been taught how to make spray starch from scratch, what side of the chair to rise from at dinner, how to soak sweat stains out of men’s shirts. She’d spent two hours every Thursday morning red-faced over increasingly complex recipe books.

John didn’t care about dinner parties, homemade blancmange or whether the knots in her darned stockings were hidden at the seam.

The tip for sweat stains had been useful; he’d lounged about one afternoon while she doused his undershirts in lemon juice and baking soda and left them to soak in the sink. He’d played her a record he’d borrowed from Paul and tried to explain about tempo. He made sweeping gestures with the hand holding his cigarette and she fretted about the ash he was dropping on the carpet (cleaned once a month, Cynthia and her mother on their hands and knees scrubbing until their arms burned).

Then he’d gotten bored and they’d had sex.

Later, he’d put on her dressing gown to make her a cuppa and she’d gone outside to hang his shirts up to dry before her mother got home.

She’d used the rest of the lemon juice on her hair, to make it lighter between re-dyeing it.

That’s what it was like with John, that’s what he wanted.

She dyed her hair blonde and wore the leather skirt he bought her. She liked the way she looked; even more when he was stood next to her, one arm around her shoulders, careless and possessive.

He liked sex and art and music when they met. Sex, art, music, in that order, and then he went away and he liked sex and art and he wanted music, the records on all the time, sets at the Cavern, sets at the Casbah and Cynthia in the audience night after night, screaming herself hoarse to be heard above everyone else.

He grinned at her from the stage, damp-haired and gorgeous in his leathers, took her home, kissed her on the bus, bought her flowers on her birthday. 

When they’d started going together, she’d thought _well, this won’t last_ – but he was good-looking and funny and she liked the way he said her name, _Cyn_ , kind of drawn out, low and sexy like he was thinking about what he wanted to do to her in the dark.

She had moved into Mendips a few months ago. Mimi could be cold; it felt like she was constantly sitting an exam or learning a particularly fiddly lesson, trying to prove herself worthy of John's attention. But she was closer to school, closer to her friends and it felt more grown-up; possessing a key to a house she hadn't grown up in. Cynthia was a little embarrassed to think Mimi knew they were sleeping together so she tried to keep to her room. John slid her notes under the door; sometimes he snuck in with her after Mimi had gone up to bed, took up most of the space beneath her horrible floral bedspread.

They'd been going steady for years now and she kept catching herself thinking longingly about her Home Ec classes, about getting a place with him, just him, so she could see him every morning, rumpled and pillow-creased. She’d make him breakfast and dinner; she’d watch him do the buttons on his shirt up before he left and help him undo them before bed; she’d doze off to the sound of his records, her head on his shoulder, his hand on her knee.

That’s what she wanted. She didn’t know what John wanted. She didn’t know if John knew what John wanted.

John wanted someone who’d laugh even when his jokes were awful, or rude, or almost cruel. John wanted it hard and fast, his hands tight on her hips, her mouth scraping his jaw, his neck. John wanted to be held more often than he’d hold her; he’d never ask for it, but she’d cottoned on, eventually, and she liked it too, the warm weight of him in her arms, his soft hair and the puffs of his breath against her skin.

John liked blondes so she’d dyed her hair; John liked music so she’d gotten strong helping him carry his equipment for band after band after band; John loved her so she got thicker skin, put up with his moods and waited patiently for him to grow up. 

It is beginning to rain when Cynthia gets back to Mendips. She hasn't started thinking of it as _home_ , but then she isn't sure she's welcome to. 

Her class had finished earlier than normal so she'd caught the earlier bus. John will probably still be with Paul but that's alright - she can sneak up to her room before Mimi came home from whichever meeting it was that she attended on a Tuesday. 

She makes herself a cup of tea and carries it upstairs - no Mimi to cough pointedly at the mere prospect of spilling a little on the carpets or the bedspread. As she passes the closed door to John's bedroom she hears or thinks she hears something but John has told her he was spending the morning at Paul’s place so she freezes, waits, nothing - it must have been the pipes - but then she hears it again, unmistakable this time, the little moan John makes when she takes him in her mouth.

Her stomach turns. Then her heart. She feels very hot and then very cold all over, a sick shiver from her spine upwards.

Phyl had told her - boys like John had a reputation for a reason, and they'd spent so long apart while he was in Hamburg but when she'd visited she hadn't noticed any difference in the way he treated her at all and he'd written her every day and called her every week and she loved him so surely he loved her too. And now they were living together, or practically living together, and they'd been going steady such a long time - but that sound was unmistakable.

Once upon a time she'd thought she'd be the sort of girl who could open the door and catch him in the act but the thought of seeing him with another girl catches something beneath her sternum and rips and she feels very foolish, stood in her stockings outside his bedroom door. Her mouth is painfully dry but she manages to say,

"John?"

And then a horrible, heavy silence.

When the door opens and it's Paul stood there, she feels so relieved she thinks she could cry.

"Paul," she says. 

He’s staring at her; his mouth opens, forms her name, but it doesn’t come out.

"Cyn, love," says John, appearing behind Paul. "You're home early."  
"Got an earlier bus," she says. Paul's shirt is buttoned up wrong. "Were you writing?"  
"Yeah," John says. "Mike's home sick with flu."  
"Oh, poor thing," Cynthia says.

Her gaze slides back to Paul. She isn't sure why his brother being unwell would prevent them from writing in his house, why it drove them to the gloomy silence of an empty Mendips. 

She isn't sure why Paul's shirt is buttoned up wrong.

It's unthinkable that he might have left the house without glancing in a mirror. There's a flush high on his cheeks and his lips are swollen. The only time Cynthia ever seen him so mussed was Dot’s birthday last year – the two of them had disappeared to the bathroom and hadn’t come back for twenty minutes while John and George had sniggered and said lewd things in high-pitched voices.

John isn't wearing his glasses. John hates wearing his glasses, but he usually ends up giving in and putting them on when he’s writing.

She notices all of it with a very strange sort of detachment, suspension. She isn’t sure she understands what she’s seeing. She isn’t sure she’s seeing what she’s seeing, like she’s peering at them through frosted glass, unable to make sense of their shapes, warped and twisted, stood on the other side.

She wouldn’t be surprised if time had slowed, only she can hear the big clock downstairs, _tick, tick, tick_. She wonders, vaguely, uncertainly, half-irritably, why neither of them have said anything, why they’re letting her stand there, feeling confused and wrong-footed and for some reason horribly aware of the hole at the heel of her stocking she hasn’t yet had a chance to darn and the teacup still curling steam up into her face.

"I better go, actually," Paul says.   
" _Alrighty, Macca_ ," John says, in some crude approximation of an American drawl. "Got a cuppa there, Cyn? Good idea that."

He shoves Paul out of the room first, Cynthia has to step back to let them pass and she turns to watch them clatter downstairs.

She stays there, pressed against the wall, vaguely aware that her teacup is beginning to burn her hands and wondering why they would be writing music in the dark, with the curtains drawn. 

" _Cyn_ -thia!" John calls, sing-song.  
"Coming!"

Paul is alone in the hallway, by the door, putting his coat on. He glances up at Cynthia as she appears at the top of the stairs and makes her way carefully down, one hand gripping the bannister. He smiles at her, a little hesitant.

She can hear John rattling around in the kitchen, the kettle singing as it boils. She stands on the bottom step.

“You don’t have to leave on my account,” she says. Her voice sounds strange to her own ears; his does as well when he says,  
“Oh, no, it’s alright. I better get back to Mikey, anyway.”  
“I hope he feels better soon,” she says.

He finishes buttoning his coat up. She watches him. It takes him too long. She thinks his hands are shaking.

She’s not sure what she’s looking for but she can’t take her eyes off him; she’s not sure what she wants him to do but there’s something wrong, something unsettling about him - which is ridiculous, because it's just Paul, it's only Paul.

Then he looks up and smiles at her again, more decided now – _it’s just Paul_ , she thinks. 

“Nice to see you for a minute then, Cyn.”  
“Yeah,” she says. He turns to unlock the door, leans back as he opens it to shout,  
“ _Bye,_ John!”  
“Bye, Macca!”

It’s only when the door has closed behind him that she realises what was missing. He didn’t have his guitar.

* * *

**ii_**

**London, 1964**

“Alright, Cyn?”

She looks up. Paul is stood over her, smiling, silhouetted by the lights of the big house behind them. He holds out a glass and she takes it, both hands, and brings it up to her nose. Scotch and soda, of course, it’s still John’s drink too.

He sits down next to her as she takes a sip, stretches his long legs out in front of him.

“Ciggie?”  
“Ta.”

He passes her one and leans over to light it. She breathes in, holds it, feels the smoke burning at the back of her throat.

“What’re you doing out here then, love?”  
“I don’t know any of them,” she says. “And I don’t think I’m dressed up enough.”  
“Me neither,” he says, nudging her shoulder with his. She smiles at him, although it’s not the same thing at all.  
“Georgie’s girlfriend’s gorgeous.”  
“Pattie,” Paul says. “Hmm.”  
“So’s Jane.”  
“Yeah,” Paul agrees. “Right cracker, that one.”  
“I feel like someone’s dowdy matron aunt,” Cynthia admits.

Paul clucks his tongue against his teeth.

“Come off it Cyn, let’s not have any of that.”  
“Well, I don’t know anyone,” she says, again. She thinks she might be drunk. “And Johnny won’t even look at me, I think he’s embarrassed.”  
“Course he’s not,” Paul says, seriously. “Cyn, Johnny loves you.”  
“I know,” she says. Her mouth feels thick with the smoke and the scotch. She never really liked it.

She wonders if he’d come out here looking for John.

She turns her whole body to face him. She's drunk enough to be interested, to examine him properly. He lets her, shifting slightly under her gaze, lifting his chin, his shoulders tightening, but he keeps his eyes on the vague shapes of the garden, finishing off his ciggie before flicking the butt out into the darkness in front of them.

No one had prepared her for John. No one had prepared her for Paul.

John wants Paul.

John likes Paul. John wants – needs – loves?

No one had ever told her how to handle that. Maybe they could have put aside fifteen minutes in-between teaching her how to make her stitches even and her chicken cooked the way through – _what to do if your man is also sleeping with his bassist._

How strange to think that he is someone who is as intimately familiar with her husband as she is. Two people who love John Lennon. Two people who have kissed John Lennon. Two people who have had John Lennon inside them – she blushes and looks away.

“Jane likes you,” he says, after a while. “She said, she’d like to get to know you better. Maybe next time you’re in London, we could get lunch. Or just you two.”  
“I’d like that,” she says.  
“And you know me,” he says.  
“I do,” she agrees. “I do know you.”

He does look at her then, holds her gaze, steady.

She's thought it before and she thinks it again now. She won't get anything out of John, she tried for a while and he was inscrutable, playing dumb, playing hurt, playing offended, but if she were to ask Paul, straight out, he might give her the answer.

Well, she already knows the answer. She knows a lot of things she didn’t know when she was twenty two, shivering outside John’s bedroom door at Mendips.

She doesn’t want to be told.

She knows that when he visits her home, her husband sleeps in his bed. She is woken at four, five a.m., when the sun is beginning to come up, pale gold and rosy light, by John crawling in with her. She pretends to be asleep but she isn’t; the mattress dips, he moves around, trying to get comfortable. He smells like Paul’s aftershave; sometimes he smells like sex.

He must think her impossibly stupid, not to have realised.

They don’t spend much time together without other people around, her and Paul. She still thinks of him as a friend, a good friend, when she thinks of him, but that isn’t as often as one might expect. She’s faintly worried that if they spend too much time alone, she’ll start to think badly of him. She thinks she should hate him, but she can't see any reason to, anymore.

He’s kind to her and sweet to her son. But it’s good that they don’t spend too much time alone. 

“Might go in,” she says. “Getting a bit chilly.”  
“Alright.”

He pushes himself to his feet and turns to help her up after him. He has the same callouses as John. His fingers feel thinner, his palm feels smaller. He squeezes her hand before letting go.

“I’ll introduce you to some people, I think you’ll like ‘em," he says. "And if you don't, I'll grab Jane and you get Johnny, and we'll make a run for it."

She wonders what he thinks of her. She wonders if he thinks of her.

“Please,” she says, adjusting the line of her skirt. “I’d like that.”

* * *

**iii_**

**Surrey, 1968**

Well, John hadn’t grown up. Or maybe he had, but she had kept growing up too. Or maybe he had passed her in the end, sort of, overnight – he’d aged thirty or forty years in experiences she would never begin to understand and now they’d been married almost five years and she still wasn’t sure what it was supposed to feel like.

Sometimes it was like they were kids again; he flirted with her at parties crowded with beautiful women, teased her for her ratty hair in the morning and kissed her deep and filthy before they went to bed. Other times, she hid in the kitchen or Jules’s playroom and listened to him move around downstairs, feeling embarrassed at her own fear – what sort of woman didn’t recognise her own husband?

Most of the time, he wasn’t there.

It was over now, anyway. She’d felt it winding down towards something for months. She wasn’t sure what she had expected – somehow, _divorce_ was still shocking, final, unexpected, the thought of it left her breathless, winded although she’d had weeks to get used to it.

She still hasn’t; she feels untethered, suddenly cut off from the world John had dropped her in, struggling to work out how to return to the one she’d come from.

Her calls to Maureen and Ringo have gone unanswered; desperate for rest and wild from loneliness, she’d even rung up George two weeks ago. George, little Georgie, who used to follow her around moony-eyed, drowned in a jacket two sizes too big for him – she hasn’t heard back from him, either.

When the doorbell rings, she looks out the window first.

So far, none of the reporters at the gates have found a way over but it’s only a matter of time.

There’s a car parked in front of the house. She recognises the car – she has sat in the backseat before, one hand on her hat to stop it blowing off in the wind, John’s mad cackle whipped backwards, lost, Paul whooping from the driver’s seat. She recognises the car but she doesn’t understand why it’s there.

She hadn’t bothered with Paul because Paul and John were a united front in everything.

When she opens the door, Julian braced on her hip, it is Paul stood outside.

It _is_ Paul but she’s exhausted and confused and she blinks at him for long enough that his smile fades.

“I should have rung ahead,” he says. He’s holding roses.  
“Paul,” she says.  
“ _Paul_!” Julian echoes, delighted, reaching out for him.

Cynthia sets him down. He almost trips over the doormat in his haste to give Paul a hug – they both move to catch him but he steadies himself against the doorframe and attaches himself to Paul’s leg. Paul puts a hand in his hair, and then crouches down to eye-level.

“You have grown, little man,” he says, beaming. “What are you now? You must be nearly twenty?”  
“Five!” Julian says, very pleased with himself.  
“ _Five_!” Paul repeats. He does a double-take, one hand pressed over his heart. Julian giggles; Cynthia does too. Paul glances up at her and smiles. He straightens up, his hand goes back to Jules’s head, smoothing back his hair. He holds out the roses again. “These are for you, Cyn.”  
“They’re beautiful,” she says, vaguely. “I’m – Sorry, Paul, do you want to come in?”

He pretends to have real trouble moving with Julian on his leg; it makes Julian howl with laughter. He’s been so brave for her, her boy, although she keeps catching him sat up on the window-seat on the second floor, his little hand pressed against the glass and it makes her heart ache to think of it, the impossible task of making him believe his daddy won’t be coming home for a while.

“D’you want some tea?” she asks.  
“D’you want some help?”  
“No, I can – if you can just stay with Jules –”  
“What, leave me alone with this little monster?” Paul says. “Hurry back, Cyn.”

She puts the roses in water and takes her time with the tea. She can hear them in the next room, banging away on John’s piano; Julian’s voice rising excitedly. 

If he's here to tell her something awful - well, what more is there to say? She's moved into one of the spare bedrooms now, after a week of nights sleeping alone in the bed she shared with John, staring blankly at the dawn colours on the ceiling and thinking of him. If Paul's here because there's something else John wants her to know, wants her to know for the sake of his pride or his conscience - She wonders if she'd be able to shout Paul down, to throw him out.

When she brings the tray in, Paul rises to help her, big smile like he's walked straight out of one of the newspaper cuttings John kept in his desk.

“Tell me quick, is it bad news?” she whispers, as Jules slides off the piano stool after him and totters over.  
“Bad news?” he repeats. “What’s bad news?”  
“Why you came,” she says.  
“Oh no, there’s no – There’s no news, good or bad, Cyn, I just came to say – To say hi.”

She frowns at him as Julian makes it over, pushing up on tip-toe to try and reach the tray.

“Hi,” she echoes, getting hold of Julian’s collar.  
“Yeah.” She thinks she can see the precise moment he turns on the charm. He’s never been good with difficult conversations. “Hi to my favourite members of the Lennon family. Is this milk for me, do you think, Julian?”  
“No it’s for me,” Julian says, seriously.  
“Not a tea-drinker yet, huh?”  
“He’ll want some if you say that,” Cynthia says. Right on cue, Julian turns big, pleading eyes on her. Paul laughs.  
“Oops, sorry.”

He stays with them for hours; he takes Julian out into the garden and Cynthia watches them race each other across the lawn, he sounds out the song he’s written on the journey from home (Cynthia imagines John’s expression, irrepressibly fond, _oh, wrote it on the journey, did you, Macca? Just on the journey? No wonder it’s shite_ ).

“Do you want to stay for dinner?” she asks.  
“Alright,” he says.

He takes Julian up for his bath and sits opposite him at dinner, making faces across the table and making a fuss of enjoying his broccoli (Jules’s new least favourite food) until Julian gives in and bites off a stalk, suspiciously.

Paul’s presence makes John’s absence feel more pronounced. She doesn’t think they’ve ever spent so long together without John there too, not so much a buffer as the thing they have in common, the thing that ties their lives together still. It’s a little bit of a relief when she can make an excuse to take Julian to bed, tucks him up and listens to him babbling sleepily about the day he’s had.

When she goes back downstairs, Paul has cleared the table and wandered back into the front room. He’s stood in front of the bookshelf, squinting at the titles they’ve collected. It’s mostly Cynthia’s and her mother’s books in here; John’s are still locked in his music room at the back of the house.

“D’you want a drink?” she says. He jumps, turns, smiles at her. “We’ve got wine or – There’s brandy somewhere, I think.”  
“Brandy, if you’ve got it,” he says.

She crosses to the drinks cart – they’d been given it as a wedding present from someone Cynthia probably no longer talks to.

“I heard about you and Jane,” she says. “I’m sorry.”  
“Yeah, well,” he says and shrugs, loose-limbed.

She wonders who he talks to, if he talks to anyone. She’s known him for years and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him even slightly ruffled.

She takes the drinks over to the sofa and after a moment, the slightest hesitation, he comes to join her, taking the glass she holds out to him.

"Well, Cyn," he says, nudging her with his elbow. "How 'bout it, then? You and me."

She laughs at him. 

"What, you don't think I've suffered enough?" she teases. He grins at her, turns away, mock-offended. She puts a hand on his arm and withdraws it, a little frightened by the feeling of him, warm skin beneath his shirtsleeve.

“So how is he?" she says. "How is he?”

Paul's throat jumps when he swallows. He sets his glass down on the table.

“I’m not too sure myself, Cyn, love, to be honest.”  
“You haven’t seen him?”  
“I’ve seen him,” Paul says. He makes a fist with his left hand, compulsive, smooths it out, slides his fingers beneath his knee.  
“But?”  
“We’re not really talking,” he says.  
“Why?”  
“I –” he says and falters. “I don’t know.”

She stares at him. He won’t look at her, his gaze locked on his glass, the little marks of precipitation beginning to form on the outside. He’s put on weight since the last time she saw him; it sits oddly on him, makes him look older and younger at the same time.

She hadn’t even considered that Paul’s visit could mean trouble between him and John. She had assumed that whatever was going on with John and that woman wouldn’t affect the world-away-from-the-world that John had always had with Paul. Maybe he thought that Yoko was smarter than Cynthia, more clued in, that she would pick up on the signs of infidelity that Cynthia had always pretended to miss. Maybe he didn’t need Paul, either, if he had her. Maybe she gave him whatever it was that Cynthia had never been able to, that he got from Paul instead.

She’s never known John without Paul. 

“Does he know you’re here?” she asks, watching him carefully. He shakes his head. “He’ll be cross, won’t he? I haven’t heard anything from the others, even Mo – ”

“He’s.” Paul says and his right leg starts jogging, nervous like a child. “I don’t know, he’s out of it, Cyn, he told us all to stay away.”

She’d thought it was something like that but it’s still a blow to hear.

“Well he will be cross then,” she says. She’s half-expecting him to laugh it off or change the subject, to do whatever it is he does that changes the atmosphere, but instead he leans in, suddenly fierce.  
“I don’t care. It’s absolute shite what he’s doing, how he says treating you and Jules and I won’t be a part of it.”

She wishes he hadn’t said that. Irritation crawls lazily beneath her skin – she knows he’s right but he shouldn’t say it like that, like he hasn’t been causing problems for her and Jules for years. She takes his glass and moves back towards the trolley.

“We could start a new club,” she says, reaching for the brandy. “People who John Lennon got bored of.”

As soon as she’s said it, she wants to take it back. Whatever anger she has – that was cruel and Paul sits back, sucking in a sharp, hurt breath.

“I’m sorry,” she says, turning to him. “God, I’m so sorry, Paul, I didn’t mean that –”  
“No, it’s –”

 _It’s fine,_ she’s expecting, which she knows would be a lie. But it’s Paul, who might be physically incapable of vulnerability, so she’s expecting vague forgiveness and his hurried escape. Instead, his voice wavers.

“It’s true,” he says, and smiles at her, and then it collapses in on itself and he puts his head in his hands.

She doesn’t know what she could possibly do to comfort him. She doesn’t know that she particularly wants to comfort him. She turns back to the drinks trolley and fills the second glass with ice, recaps the brandy for something to do, reaches for the scotch instead.

When she turns back round, he’s sat up straight again, mercifully dry-eyed, impressively composed. He holds out a hand to take the glass she brings over for him. The ice clinks as he takes it but she can’t tell if he’s shaking or she is.

“I don’t think he got bored of you,” she says, quietly. “I don’t think he’s bored of you.”

He opens his mouth, perhaps he wants to say something but nothing comes out. She wonders if he knows how much she knows.

“He’s not the same anymore,” she says. “So we – or, I don’t know, so I don’t mean the same to him. Is that it?”

She desperately wants to know. She’s been racking her brain for months, for years, probably, trying to work out if there was anything she could have done differently, done better. No one had ever told her how to keep a husband who doesn’t want to be kept. It seems stupid now, trivial, all that time spent on blancmange and table settings. John had never cared; he’d never really seemed to notice.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I think – ” He falters. “I don’t know. I think he doesn’t like it, that I think I know him.”

On impulse, she reaches out and takes his hand.

“I don’t want to speak for him,” Paul says, staring at her fingers on his wrist. “Apparently I do that too much. I just – I mean, you made him – He did love – He does love – I just think he’s – He’s trying but he doesn’t know – And I don’t know and you don’t – ”

He glances up at her, through his long lashes.

She feels very suddenly nineteen again; Phyl telling her, when they were hundreds of years younger, giggling in a pub in the Wirral, that if Paul had been a girl, she’d have been in trouble. They’d elbowed each other and blushed and snorted at the idea. 

She has never thought of Paul with anything approaching desire before. By the time she’d met Paul, she’d been completely in love with John; she’d barely noticed him because John cast everyone else in the shade. Even now, she is not sure the sudden lick of heat in her stomach is because it is Paul but rather comes spiteful and bitter, from the thought of how much it would hurt John, to know they had been together.

So she tilts her head and kisses him.

For a moment, it is shockingly familiar. For a moment, she is sure it is because it is Paul, who she has known for coming on ten years, because he smells like John, because they are kissing on the sofa in the house John bought for her, because she has not kissed another person in such a long time and she is still thinking of John.

Then she realises that it does not feel like kissing John but like kissing herself, or that there is something in the way Paul kisses that she suspects must have an echo in the way she does. They’re both in the habit of kissing John, who is dominant, who likes to take control, his hands in her hair or on her jaw.

She has never thought about it like that before; she has never let herself dwell on it. The idea that he kissed Paul the way he kissed her cuts something inside her cleanly in two.

She pulls back. She is vaguely surprised to find that she is crying. She is more surprised to look up and see that Paul’s eyes are wet too.

“Goodness,” she says, half-laughing, wiping at her eyes, which makes him smile and he leans forward again and presses his lips to her cheek.  
“Sorry,” he says, and this time she lets him, takes his hand on the sofa between them and squeezes it tight.  
“No, it’s alright, it was me as well – It’s not a good idea.”  
“A very bad idea,” he agrees.  
“Still,” she says. “I’ve kissed two out of four Beatles now. I ought to write to Sixteen.”

He laughs.

“You can do a comparison,” he says. “It’ll fly off the shelves.”  
“Pay for the divorce lawyer,” she says, without thinking and feels her smile falter as she watches his fade.  
“Are you going to be alright?” he asks, seriously.  
“I don’t know,” she says. “I think so. Are you going to be alright?”  
“I don’t know either,” he says. “Yes. I suppose. Eventually.”

She smiles at him, reaches up to brush his hair out of his eyes, rests her palm briefly against his cheek. He turns into it, presses another kiss to the heel of her hand and then he stands up.

“I ought to get going,” he says.  
“It’s late,” she says. “You can stay if you like.”  
“Best not,” he says. “But give me a ring, Cyn, if you need something. Anything. Really.”  
“I will,” she says, knowing she won’t.

At the door, he pauses, one hand braced against it, like he’s steadying himself.

“Cyn,” he says. “Are you going to tell? About John? About me and John?”

And there it is: at last, out in the open between them.

When she looks at him, she feels suddenly very sorry for him. He still looks so much like he did at seventeen; he hasn’t changed the way John has, wearing all his pain and anger, the bitterness of his wild talent and impossible wealth in the new lines on his face, his new hair, his new clothes. She can never ask. She thinks he must feel like she does, like the ground has collapsed beneath them. She wonders if he had felt it coming, as she had done, the slip and slide of John’s moods and changing affections, clinging on with bloodied nails and John all but chewing himself free in his haste to be gone.

What a world they live in.

“Of course not,” she says and means it entirely. “I love you both.”


End file.
